Posts from the ‘General’ Category

So I went to listen to a lecture by Laurie Haycock at Cranbrook a few weeks ago, and it was definitely interesting, but quite beautiful. Most of the lecture she talked about the work she and her husband (Scott P. Makela) made together, and it was a tragic love story (Scott passed away very suddenly and she has been a widow for about 14 years now).

One of her Husband’s greatest accomplishments that she touched on was the typeface he created, called Dead History. It is licensed by Emigre and is a combination of serif and sans-serif typefaces. Scott used this typeface a lot in his pieces, and I think it’s very innovative and has a unique style to it that cannot be recreated.

Laurie seemed to focus a lot more on her husband’s work than her own, so below is one of the pieces her husband worked on. She said he was very obsessed with using the ‘twirl’ tool when designing thing (as evident in the picture) and it was very forward-thinking and dynamic in their time.

Lastly, one of the projects that Laurie and Scott were most proud of seemed to be the typeface used in the opening of Fight Club that some of their students actually created. I’ve never seen Laurie or her husband’s work before going to this lecture so it was nice that she mentioned something that has a much wider audience and received a lot of fame (since everyone has heard of Fight Club!).

Overall the lecture was very emotional since she definitely focused on the connection between her and her husband and how that affected the art they created.. They were great partners in life and in art and I am glad I went to the lecture and got to experience that. It also helped me to realize that I should break out of my shell and indulge myself more into my work to create something original and dynamic rather than something that will please everybody.

So my father mentioned this place to me one day so I decided to check out their site, they are called Deep Woods Press and they are located in Northern Michigan and they reproduce old, classical books in the hand-lettering style.. they also use intaglio and wood engravings for the imagery in the books… they are a very tiny place and I think their craft and their designs are impecable, truly interesting to look at, and definitely earns respect when you think about the process of going about something like these… here’s one of their books…

And here’s the site to their blog if anyone wants to check them out more! Locally made in michigan 🙂

“With the ability to produce so much work, it’s harder to know whether what you are doing is any good.”

– This is definitely true and kind of a major smack in the face, especially since more and more people have access to the commonly used design tools, essentially anyone can become an amateur graphic designers or typographer.

“Modern designers must use the gift of iteration to work towards a conclusion rather than as an opportunity to explore every known avenue.”

– This is interesting because I guess I always tended to think that iterations should be completely different explorations in a sense – try the outrageous, even if you don’t think it will work, just do it and see – that’s what I saw iterations as, so I guess I was being a little too broad in my explorations sometimes when a teacher asks for 2 or 3 iterations – instead of starting over from scratch each time, I guess just try to make each one better than the next.

“…There is no advantage in this ability to experiment if we don’t use it as an opportunity to leap into the void.”

So I had an amazing spring break… one of the things I had the opportunity to do was to go to Signal Return Letter Press in Downtown Detroit and make some postcards… Below are a few of the ones I played around with. I really got a thrill out of doing this all by hand, and it definitely makes you appreciate the craft a lot more since it’s very time-consuming and tedious. I loved making this post cards and I definitely am more interested in hand-setting type and printing things the old-fashioned way! Hopefully I’ll get to go back soon and make some more 🙂

Nice quote that stopped me in my tracks. Even though I’m a Graphic Designer, I love doing project by getting messy (screen printing, drawing, painting, etc). I don’t think value will ever be lost in handmade art.

Here’s a really cool post I found on the Design Observer site. It talks about this German Book from the 17th Century that basically is just a compilation of different calligraphy styles applied to the alphabet. What’s truly amazing is that each page gets more and more ornate. The time it took to make these is probably ridiculous, and I definitely don’t have a steady enough hand to do something like this so I definitely respect and admire it! Take a look.

I think it gets to a certain point where some of these are borderline-beyond-legible, but amazing to look at nonetheless!

I stumbled upon an article on Eye Magazine.com that talks about Monotype’s typographical adviser, Stanley Morison, who published an article about newspaper design (that I didn’t get to fully read yet).

The quote next to this picture states “This cover photograph, probably conceived by Beatrice Warde, is the likely cause of the misconception that there was a typeface called ‘Times Old Roman’ prior to October 1932. Before that year’s redesign The Times had used a version of Monotype Modern, which was adapted from a typeface created by the Edinburgh foundry Miller & Richards.”

I think it’s just a cool looking poster and comes up with the idea of an ‘Times Old Roman’, even thought it never existed, yet you can clearly see the difference between the two typefaces.

Love this! Wish I made it 😛 Great colors, great balance throughout and really keeps your eye interested and engaged. Also there’s a lot of depth created just by using different colors and simply-shaped lines. Very nice!